Tuesday, July 03, 2007

ANOTHER APE-FOUND "H"

3 comments:

This is not, of course, the first time an ape has found the letter “H.” In her groundbreaking book Hey, Look! A Chimp!, famed English anthropologist and disco enthusiast Jane Goodall recounts the story of an early encounter with a large pack of monkeys just returned from exploring the deep Gombe jungle. She was startled to see that each chimpanzee was carrying a single letter of the alphabet, roughly carved from the bark of a mangrove tree. Her favorite chimpanzee -- the one she had scientifically named Major Alowishus Longbow Smythe-Giggleswick[1] -- was laboring under the weight of a large lowercase “h” and comically stumbling as he struggled to keep up with the others. It was not until the monkeys had arranged their letters atop a nest of flattened wampa leaves that Ms Goodall understood their purpose, as the letters spelled out: “U gO hOm nOw!”

Still, it’s a very nice “H.”

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[1] Ms Goodall often met with criticism from modern primatologists[2] due to her habit of giving chimpanzees incredibly long and hard-to-remember names, usually with a corresponding military rank. This led to uncounted discrepancies in anthropological circles, culminating in the infamous Goodall-Leakey fistfight of 1972, after Leakey misordered an important morphological hierarchy by incorrectly ranking chimpanzee Adrian Spinster-Tree Washingtub Spencer, III as “Captain.” (Everyone knows, now, that Spencer was in fact a lieutenant colonel.)

[2] Microsoft Word, a product I am forced to use given that I do not own a Mac, does not recognize the word “primatologists” and suggests, instead, “grammatologists.” When I Google this word, the search engine helpfully proposes that I might have meant “dermatologists,” but regardless directs me to a Wikipedia article on the Hebrew word “hillul” ("see: Proto-Alphabeto-Grammatologists-Reasoning," but I refuse to go any further). Typing the word hillul, of course, makes the rather anti-Semitic word processing program crash immediately.